Halloween Fun

This week we have what we call non-pupil week. Basically, it’s a full week without students designated to staff development, training, and time to get caught up on some things and prepare for what’s left of our first semester. This week couldn’t have come soon enough because I am worn out from all of the International Day and Halloween festivities!

All last week, we did Halloween themed activities including reading and writing scary stories, spooky word problems in math, and even an ICT lesson where the students created a flyer advertising the Halloween carnival on Friday. It was a ton of fun, but I’m glad it’s over.

Halloween Word Problems-

We did a review of dividing decimals with a Halloween twist. You can steal the worksheet here.

Trick or Treat Bags-

Keeping with the holiday tradition, our school sets up a route around campus for all the students to go trick or treating. Each class has to make their own little baskets or bags for collecting candy. Here’s what we did:

1.      Start with a standard A4 thick paper. We used white because we wanted to decorate them for Halloween, but you can use any color you want.

2.      Turn the paper horizontally and fold each side toward the middle making sure there’s a little overlap. Glue or tape your seam.

3.      Turn it vertically and fold the bottom up about 5cm.

4.      Open the bottom section and fold down to make 2 triangles.

5.      Fold in the tops and bottoms of the triangle making sure to overlap a little for gluing or taping.

 

6.      Punch two holes in the top for your ribbon handles.

7.      Choose your ribbon and decorations.

8.      Viola! You have one super cute trick or treat bag. Or small, personalized gift bag.

DIY Ring Toss-

 Part of my job every year is to come up with a carnival game for Halloween and International Day. Last year, I remember the games being a little too easy for my students because they’re the oldest, so this year I wanted to try something a bit more challenging. I used to love going to the carnival or state fair when it was in town and all those fun games that were nearly impossible to win, but still fun as hell to play. That was my inspiration for this year’s booth- The Wicked Ring Toss.

All you need are some empty beer bottles and small plastic rings and you’re in business. Here’s a picture of mine all finished:

 

·         WARNING: This game is A LOT harder than it looks. Not recommended for kindergartenJ

Paper Pumpkin Mosaics-

Every Thursday, I run an after-school Art Club with students from Grade 2-4 and every Thursday I get headaches. I haven’t figured out if these two things are related, but I think it’s a safe assumption. Anyway, the club is only 45 minutes so I wanted a project that they could actually finish. Behold, paper pumpkin mosaics. It’s not my best art lesson, but they seemed to enjoy themselves and hey, we finished.

 

Scary Short Stories-

As promised, here are a couple of the finished narrative pieces from last week.

Scary Story 1

Scary Story 2

FIS Halloween Pics-

Here's a few pictures from Friday's festivities... Hope you all have a great Halloween!

Writer's Notebook

I was first introduced to the concept of a writer’s notebook last Christmas when we were back in Georgia visiting family. Jeff’s (my partner) dad is a retired English teacher from a wonderful private school there and was nice enough to arrange a school tour AND put me in contact with a colleague of his during our visit. She told me about one of the tools that they use in language arts called a writer’s notebook and right away I loved this idea. I  wanted to learn more about it so I bought the books she recommended and have been using them in my classroom ever since.

The idea  behind the writer's notebook comes from research done by RalphFletcher and it just makes sense. Here's what we know about writers:
* Writers are different.
*Writers use different processes.
* Writers need time and tools to develop their writing skills.
Although these ideas are basic, we tend to forget to take them into account when planning our lessons at times. Ralph Fletcher gets to the heart of these challenges and makes it make sense... if that makes any sense. His books are brilliant and have totally changed my approach to teaching writing. I highly recommend them if you are struggling with teaching writing.

Anyway, like most things in my class, I wanted to provide my students with a real-life example to help them better understand my expectations and get them started with creating their own writer's notebooks. Here’s a short video that I created for you to see my example and a slideshow of some of my pages. If you have any suggestions of how you’ve used the writer’s notebook in your class, please share them. Happy Writing!

 

 

 

 

 

More math fun!

 

If you’re like me then you’re always looking for ways to fun up a math lesson for your kids. Unfortunately, students often feel intimidated or overwhelmed with challenging math concepts. It’s not uncommon for my students to zone out, get distracted, or even shut down completely during math and the funny thing is that I was the exact same way with math when I was growing up. I loathed sitting in math class and I dreaded being called on for fear of having the wrong answer. These days, it’s one of my absolute favorite subjects to teach because unlike so many other subjects, there are definitive answers. There’s something to be said for the formulaic, systematic, black and white side of life. So many things need interpretation and are subjective that it’s nice to teach with the left-brain throughout the day. I digress.

Anyway, so I’m constantly perusing Pinterest and other wonderful blogs for ways to bring life and fun into math and here are a couple of the things I’ve found that I’ve been using for task board just to reinforce some of the more difficult concepts we’ve been learning:

Math Jenga  

I’m sure most of you have played Jenga in day and guess what? It’s still fun even after all of these years! This game is not the quietest of activities, but it’s great for those task boards where you can play some music and have a little fun. All you need for this station is a Jenga set and some math problem cards. Now, there’s a couple ways to do this; a) you can tape the problems onto the blocks or b) you can have them draw a card for every block they successfully remove/replace. Here’s a picture for reference and I’ve attached my decimal division strips below if you want to use them. Enjoy!

Math Jenga- Dividing Decimals

Math Memory

Who doesn’t love a good game of memory, right? Ok, I have to admit that this one isn’t the fan favorite in class, but it beats me droning on at the front of the board for an hour. If you asked my kids, they’d say just about anything beats thatJ

For this one, I simply created a table in a word document where I imported problems and answers (in different boxes, of course), printed it out, then put a colored piece of cardstock behind it before laminating and BAM- you’re done. I generally use a different colored cardstock for each concept so they don’t get all mixed up together. I’ve made a couple of sets so far and they’re a really great review before a test. Feel free to snag the template below or leave a comment if you’ve got an easier way of doing it. Thanks and have a lovely night.

Decimal-Fraction Memory Cards

Decimal-Percentage Memory Cards

 

Scary short stories

Halloween has always been one of my absolute favorite holidays. As a kid, I usually had my costume picked out by my birthday in the summer and couldn’t wait to go trick or treating with my friends. The amount of loot we made out with every year still blows my mind… I mean, who really needs 86lbs of candy? It’s insane. I’m pretty sure that’s when my sugar addition and subsequent tooth decay started, but that’s not what this post is all about.

Beyond the costumes and candy, Halloween is the official kickoff of the holiday season. It’s a time for haunted houses and ghost stories. A time for FUN. And that’s what this week is all about.

In language arts, we’ve been working on narrative writing so I decided to shake things up with some good ol’ scary stories. I’m not a huge fan of horror in general, but the students love them and they’re great for teaching elements of good narrative writing.

We started the lesson with a couple of spooky tales from this AWESOME website. I read the first one aloud in our reading area while we pretended to be around a campfire at night. Then we brainstormed together on the white board about what elements make up a scary story. Here’s a look at what we came up with:

Excuse my messy board

 

Here's the PDF if you want to download it.

Later, I turned them loose to start drafting their own haunted stories that they will share later in the week with the class.

Because I’m trying to find new and interesting ways for my students to present their work with 6 + 1 traits, I am going to have them voice record their stories and use editing software to add creepy sound effects to the background. I’m really excited to see the finished products. I promise to post more on these when I have them completed. Until then, enjoy some Halloween candy for meL

Constitutions

 

For our theme unit on citizenship and government, the students were tasked with creating a country and then later writing a national constitution to outline their chosen type of government, laws, and rights and responsibilities of their citizens. I think I was being a bit unrealistic about what a big project this would be for my students, but they did really well overall. We studied different forms of government and looked up constitutions from around the world to get familiar with the structure and organization before we drafted ours. After several revisions and lots of peer-editing (and what feels like a thousand years), we were ready for publishing. YAY! This part was, by far, the most fun we had with this project. We took sheets of white cardstock and dyed them with tea, burned the edges to make them look old and authentic, and then practiced our best penmanship to create our finished product.

If I had this to do over, I would have scrapped it all together because of the level of difficulty. Concepts like political ideology are a bit too advanced for my students. I feel like they learned a lot about the role of government in a country, but aside from that, this was a disaster. So, if you’re thinking about doing something similar, I recommend that you simplify as much as possible. Here’s a photo of one of the final products. If you want a sample constitution, send me a message and I’ll email it to you. Enjoy your weekend!

Geometry, Shapes and Nets, Oh My!

We’ve been studying the basics of geometry over the past week and doing some fun activities with 3D shapes and nets. Unlike other areas of math, working with shapes and nets are generally seen as more fun by most younger students, especially when you get to draw and build things during math time… and that’s exactly what we’ve been up to. If you’re looking for a creative way to jazz up geometry in the classroom, here are a few ideas.

Activity 1- Building prisms and pyramids

I got this idea while I was looking through our Hong Kong math book a few weeks back preparing for the first unit of geometry. I was looking for something that was hands-on and that allowed my students to practice and create the 3D shapes we’d just learned. This one’s great for the kinesthetic learners in the classroom, but fun enough to engage all the students.

Divide your students into small groups or let them work independently if you have enough supplies for each student. Give them a small ball of clay (about the size of a bouncy ball) and a handful of toothpicks and tell them to build basic 3D shapes. What I did was have them build the shapes then draw and label them in their math journals so they could refer back to them in the future. Another extension could be to list the number of edges, vertices and faces of the shapes. I would be willing to bet that this little activity has helped my students remember the vocabulary more than any other that we’ve done in this unit and it was fun. What a bonus!

 

Activity 2- Isometric Sketching

This year I’ve been trying to do as much journaling as possible with my kids because it’s such a great tool for enhancing learning. I just love the outside-the-box thinking that happens when you do a journal activity for math. This week, one of our journal activities was to use isometric dot paper to create something in 3D. I let them draw whatever they wanted on the dot paper and then asked them to write a short description explaining what they made and what shapes they used to create it. I was pretty impressed with the results. Just google “Isometric Dot Paper”, copy & paste it into a Word document, resize it and you’re good to go. Here’s a couple of pics of what ours look like.

 

 

Activity 3- 3D Shape Mobile

  Ok, so I totally used this as our art project for last week, but it could easily fit into a math lesson. I printed out a bunch of nets of 3D shapes here then we colored them, cut them out and made a pretty hanging mobile for our classroom. What I loved most about this activity is that it took little to no preparation on my part and the kids enjoyed it. I’d say it was a win-win. I’ll be sure to snap a picture of our finished product tomorrow. Until then, I hope you’re having a great week!

 

Treasure Island: A multi-purpose board game

Are you looking for a fun math station activity for task board time? Need an engaging way to help your kids review for an exam? Look no further; Treasure Island is the answer. It’s a board game that I made a couple of weeks ago to help my kids practice and review dividing decimals before their big test, but could easily be adapted for any subject. I drew the game board on a large piece of cardstock and printed out some pirate clipart from the internet to decorate it. Then, I created a table with leveled question cards in MS Word, printed them on different colored paper, and laminated them. I printed one extra sheet so the kids playing the game during task board time could show their work and sign the questions that they completed. I put the laminated question cards, player pieces, and dice in a small plastic baggie with game instructions in the math activity bin so it’s easy for the kids to just grab it and get to work. I will be adding different question cards before each big math test just to mix it up, but they really seemed to like it. Here are a couple of pictures of the board and the MS Word document that I created for the question cards. Enjoy!

 

Treasure Island Question Cards

Idiom Collages

It wasn’t until I started teaching that I found myself analyzing language and trying to find creative ways to pass language on to my (mostly) ESL students. What I’ve realized is that todays’ speech is full of figurative language, idioms, colloquialisms and slang. These things make English seem complex, confusing, and difficult to learn for students. But the students aren’t always the only ones struggling with it; teaching English can be just as daunting.

In an effort to bring fun back into learning English, I decided to try something new with teaching idioms. We started the lesson by looking at some common idioms and their meanings then broke down the difference between literal and figurative meanings. Later we chose our favorite idiom and made a contrasting collage from magazine clippings to explain the meaning of the idioms. Not only did they learn some new expressions, they had a blast bring those expressions to life. Once the collages were finished, each student shared what they created. If you have any other ideas of how you’ve taught figurative language, feel free to leave a comment for me. Thanks and have a great weekend!

Origami Fun

I’ve been meaning to post these pictures for a couple of weeks now, but I got busy and well, you know how it goes. Anyway, in our last unit on Sadako, we did an art lesson on origami. We learned about the history of origami and how it was adopted by the Japanese from the Chinese and how, when it originated, it was only for the elite class because the cost of paper was so expensive. As paper became cheaper, origami grew in popularity and nowadays is an art form practiced by people all around the world. I have to admit that I was never really interested in folding paper until I watched a great film called “Between the Folds” that explored the relationship between nature, mathematics and art through the medium of origami. After I showed my class a clip from the movie, they got really excited to start folding. Luckily, my partner taught me to make an origami crane so that I could at least teach them one step-by-step origami piece (and it was perfect for Sadako). I checked out all of the origami books that we have in the library and we went to town. It was a really fun afternoon in class. Check out the video clip and pictures below. Happy Friday!  

 

Official Trailer for Between the Folds

 

 

Our cranes

Folding fun

 

Columbus Day Art

Yesterday was Columbus Day in America and what better way to celebrate the “discovery of the new world” than with art? Usually art falls on Fridays as a little reward for working so hard all week, but last week was our first fundraiser for Service Learning and my kids missed out on art. So, to make it up to them we did art on Monday and had a blast with this great project. I got this idea from Patty over at www.deepspacesparkle.com and it was a ton of fun and SUPER easy to teach.

I began the lesson with a brief story of Christopher Columbus and the explorers at that time just to set the scene of what it would have been like to be one of the first settlers of the new world. We had a great discussion about the challenges and fears these adventurers must have faced at that time. Then, we looked at a few drawings of Clipper Ships, or pirate ships as my kids like to call them, and studied the basic shapes that make up the outline. Once we played around with some practice drawings, we were ready for our good piece of paper… I only allow students one thick sheet of paper for a final print to reduce the waste and carelessness that can sometimes happen in art class.

Once our pencil outlines were done, we busted out the watercolors and that’s when the real fun started. I have to admit, this was a big project and one that I don’t recommend trying to finish in one sitting, but we pulled through it and they look beautiful. Here are the finished products:

Making Connections

Even though all of my students are mostly fluent readers, I think it’s important to revisit reading strategies throughout the year to allow students to THINK about what they’re reading. By creating an opportunity for students to discuss and interact with a text, the learning is automatically deepened and the students feel empowered as good readers.

The first reading comprehension strategy that we revisited this year was Making Connections. When a reader makes a connection to a text, they generally make one of the following 3 connections:

1.       Text-to-Self- This is when the reader connects what they’re reading to a personal experience.

·        “That reminds me of a time when I…”

2.       Text-to-World- This is when a connection can be made from the story to something that happens in the world.

·        “This makes me think of something that happens…”

3.       Text-to-Text- This is when what you’re reading reminds you of something else you’ve read.

·        “This is similar to a story I read about…”

All of these are things that fluent readers do even without realizing it. That’s what’s so cool about teaching reading… you’re giving them skills that they will use for the rest of their lives. And isn’t that what it’s all about anyway?

Since we’ve been working with non-fiction texts for the last month or so, I was getting a little bored with the left-brain stuff so I thought, let’s do something a little different. I chose the book Harvesting Hope by Kathleen Krull for a few reasons. One, it’s a short read so my students with short attention spans will stay engaged throughout the lesson. Two, I love the life story of Cesar Chavez and what better way to tie in the theme of citizenship & government? Third, there are about a thousand connections that a reader can make with that book.

Before reading the book, I handed out a worksheet on Reading Strategies that I created a while ago and we went through them as a group as a refresher and filed the worksheet in our Reader’s Notebook. Then, I told them we were going to practice the Making Connections strategy while reading Harvesting Hope. We read the first few pages aloud and paused after each page so I could model the strategy of connecting to the text. Later, I turned them loose to finish the book on their own and write down at least 2 examples of each connection (TtS, TtW, TtT) in their notebooks to share at circle time. The following day for task board, the students took their notes from the previous day and made these awesome thought bubble pieces about the connections they made. They turned great and they had a fun time doing them. Check it out!

Service Learning Project

Wow… sorry I’ve been AWOL for a couple of weeks. You wouldn’t believe how busy I’ve been. Unless of course you are a teacher, then I guess you would. Anyway, the year is in full swing now and we’ve hit the ground running with some scary exciting new projects. One of these projects is a Service Learning Program. If you’re not familiar with service learning, basically it’s a student-run community service club that aims to tie in curriculum while helping those in need. When I was first approached by the Grade 5 teacher with this idea, I was more than on board and excited, given my background in non-profit and my love for volunteer work. As it turns out, this takes quite a bit of time, planning, organization and WORK. I know, I know, I should have guessed that, but you know, I’m delusional at times.

Luckily, the current theme of “Citizenship & Government” was the perfect launching pad for something like this because there are so many teaching opportunities and concepts that overlap. Our group of 5^th and 6^th graders started by doing a needs assessment of the community to choose two separate “causes” that they’d like to fundraise for. This is where living in a place like Vietnam is so completely different than America. Because Vietnam is a developing nation, there are a lot of newly wealthy people here but it still looks like a 3^rd world country in many ways. As you know, we started the year by reading Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes about a young girl who develops Leukemia as a result of the atomic bomb dropped on her city by the Americans. This hits close to home here because the aftermath of Agent Orange is still all visible… even 4 generations later. So one of the needs we came up with was to help the child victims suffering from the effects of this deadly chemical at a local hospital. The other charity we chose is a wonderful non-profit group here called Wildlife At Risk who help endangered and injured wildlife in and around Vietnam. Both are worthy causes and both are in need of our support.

Once that decision was made, the real fun started with brainstorming about fundraising activities, setting goals, discussing budgets/profit margins, and marketing. We formed committees and assigned jobs to each student to make the experience more meaningful. Each committee is in charge of everything from contacting the organization, to making flyers, writing and translating letters to the parents, organizing the fundraising events, collecting data, and working together to problem solve. That is not an easy task list for most 10-12 year olds. I am so proud of the students for rising to the challenges presented to them. Our first fundraiser is scheduled for next week during recess where the groups will be selling smoothies and popcorn. I will keep you posted on our progress and later about our field trip to deliver our donations to the kids at the Peace Hospital. Very exciting stuff. Have a great day, everyone!